The  Art  of  Of 


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The  Art  of  Life  Series 


Human  Equipment 


BY  THE  SAME  AUTHOR: 

MORAL  EDUCATION 
THE  NEW  HUMANISM 
A  BOOK  OF  MEDITATIONS 
THE  USE  OF  THE  MARGIN 


THE   ART  OF  LIFE  SERIES 
Edward    Howard    Griggs,    Editor 

Human     Equipment 

ITS  USE  AND  ABUSE 


BY 
EDWARD   HOWARD   GRIGGS 


"  The  technical  work  of  our  time,  which  is  done  to  an  un- 
precedented perfection,  has,  by  increasing  and  multiplying 
objects  of  luxury,  given  the  favorites  of  fortune  a  choice  be- 
tween more  leisure  and  culture  upon  the  one  side,  and  addi- 
tional luxury  and  good  living,  but  with  increased  activity, 
upon  the  other;  and,  true  to  their  character,  they  choose  the 
latter,  and  prefer  champagne  to  freedom."— ScAofenAauer. 


NEW  YORK 
B.    W.    HUEBSCH 

i  909 


Copyright,  1909,  by 
EDWARD  HOWARD  GRIGGS 


PRINTED  IN  U.  S.  A. 


Human  Equipment 

THIS  brief  study  deals  with  the  prob- 
lem of  the  right  use  of  things  —  that 
problem  of  man's  relation  to  his  material 
equipment  which,  like  the  poor,  is  always 
with  us,  growing  increasingly  difficult 
as  civilization  develops.  We  become 
acutely  conscious  of  this  problem  in 
times  of  business  stress,  but  the  true 
causes  of  the  suffering  that  arouses  us 
lie  further  back  in  our  conduct  during 
periods  of  prosperity.  Thus  the  prob- 
lem is  one  of  universal  import,  with  ap- 
plication to  life  in  every  time. 

Life  would  be  simple  and  its  issues 
easily  solved  if  it  were  statical  and  not 
growing.  Had  we  to  deal  only  with 
fixed  factors  and  relations,  the  need 
would  be  merely  to  deduce  rightly  the 
law  of  these  and  then  ever  after  apply 

7 


8  Human  Equipment 

it.  Life  is,  however,  not  statical  but 
dynamic,  a  growth-process  going  on 
endlessly.  Thus  we  have  to  deal  with 
constantly  changing  factors  and  relations, 
and  the  rule  which  worked  so  well  yes- 
terday does  not  at  all  apply  to-day.  As 
history  never  repeats  itself  in  the  larger 
world,  the  swing  of  the  pendulum  ever 
returning  on  a  somewhat  different  plane, 
so  in  personal  life  just  the  same  situa- 
tion never  twice .  occurs.  The  old  ele- 
ments may  all  be  present,  but  they  are 
in  ever  new  combination;  and  the  fresh 
equation  of  old  forces  cannot  be  antici- 
pated. Thus  the  problem  can  never  be 
solved  by  rule;  great  principles  indeed 
always  apply,  but  the  application  must 
be  made  freshly  to  each  concrete  case. 
This,  indeed,  is  why  life  is  always  a 
fine  art  and  can  never  be  reduced  to 
exact  science.  While  man  lives  he 
grows,  and  in  the  growth  itself  is  the 
life.  The  problem  consists  thus  in  main- 
taining, at  every  point,  an  unstable  equi- 


Human  Equipment  9 

librium.  We  may  fail  in  either  of  two 
opposite  directions:  if  life  becomes  stati- 
cal and  fixed,  it  settles  into  a  blind 
routine  that  is  death;  if  we  lose  the 
equilibrium,  there  results  a  destructive 
riot  of  disordered  forces.  Life  de- 
mands preserving  the  equilibrium,  but 
maintaining  or  even  increasing  the  in- 
stability as  growth  proceeds. 

The  opposing  types  of  failure  can 
both  be  traced  in  every  aspect  of  life. 
In  politics,  the  one  form  is  shown  in 
the  stagnation  that  marked  China  for 
thousands  of  years,  the  other  is  seen 
in  the  wild  chaos  of  a  French  Revolu- 
tion. In  religion,  the  one  is  dead  for- 
malism, the  other  an  ungoverned  riot 
of  feeling  and  imagination.  In  art,  the 
one  tendency  ends  in  the  dry  artifice  of 
the  pseudo-classic,  the  other  in  the  ex- 
cesses of  unbalanced  romanticism.  In 
conduct,  the  one  failure  is  slavish  con- 
ventionality; the  other  is  unrestrained 
expression  of  every  impulse  and  desire. 


io  Human  Equipment 

Man's  spirit  seems  to  oscillate  between 
these  extremes :  on  the  one  side  a  Sahara 
desert  of  dead  routine,  on  the  other  a 
tropical  jungle  of  wasteful  recklessness. 
It  might  be  suggested  that  the  desert  is 
worse  than  the  jungle,  since  it  is  mere 
death,  while  the  jungle  contains  the  good 
and  the  bad  growing  side  by  side  in 
profligate  fecundity;  but  either  is  deadly 
compared  to  the  life  that  ever  grows  in 
balanced  harmony. 

Aristotle  was  probably  aware  of  these 
opposing  types  of  failure  in  working  out 
his  theory  of  virtue  as  a  mean  between 
two  extremes.  His  theory  is  a  groping 
in  the  right  direction,  but  does  not  ade- 
quately meet  the  issue,  for  the  desirable 
"  mean  "  is  not  half-way  between  two 
extremes,  but  includes  the  truth  on 
both  sides.  What  we  want  is  growth 
and  equilibrium,  not  something  between 
the  two.  The  highest  life  is  never  a 
compromise  between  opposing  forces, 
but  an  inclusion  of  them  in  a  higher 


Human  'Equipment  1 1 

unity.  It  is  order  and  freedom  that  is 
required,  not  a  mean  between  them.  If 
order  be  destroyed,  freedom  becomes 
license;  if  freedom  be  abrogated,  order 
becomes  tyranny.  Thus  both  principles 
must  be  present,  contained  in  a  higher 
union,  in  the  true  society.  So  in  art, 
both  significance  and  harmony  are  re- 
quired, not  a  compromise  that  misses  at 
once  deep  meaning  and  perfect  beauty. 
The  supreme  application  of  this  law 
is  to  the  relation  of  man  to  his  material 
equipment.  Man's  whole  existence  rests 
on  this  equipment,  developed  by  his  la- 
bor acting  on  the  resources  of  Nature. 
Man  cannot  create  something  out  of 
nothing.  The  raw  material  is  all  fur- 
nished by  the  earth  on  which  he  lives; 
but  this  material  is  transformed  by  hu- 
man toil  and  intelligence  into  the  count- 
less tools  and  furnishings  of  life. 
There  is  no  other  material  wealth;  and 
no  matter  how  refined  and  complicated 
the  life  of  a  cultivated  society  may  be, 


12  Human  Equipment 

all  that  it  utilizes  has  been  obtained 
from  the  two  sources  —  man's  work  on 
the  basis  of  Nature's  gifts. 

We  can  readily  trace,  through  the 
past,  the  steady  and  amazing  increase 
in  this  equipment  of  civilization,  from 
primitive  times  unto  to-day.  Indeed, 
this  increase  in  wealth  is  often  taken 
to  be  the  main  test  of  progress;  as, 
truly,  in  right  relation  to  life,  it  is  the 
most  coarsely  obvious  evidence  of  that 
progress.  The  popular  conception  of 
civilization  in  contrast  to  barbarism  is 
largely  in  terms  of  fine  houses,  clothes, 
theaters,  museums,  industrial  buildings 
and  railway  trains.  How  false  this 
standard  may  become  we  shall  soon  see ; 
meantime,  its  all  but  universal  accept- 
ance indicates  how  impressive  the  cease- 
less growth  of  this  human  equipment  is. 

It  is  during  the  last  hundred  years 
that  this  growth  has  been  most  astound- 
ing. To  consider  only  two  of  the 
myriad  inventions  and  discoveries  of  the 


Human  Equipment  13 

last  century:  note  how  the  use  of  steam 
and  electricity  as  means  of  communica- 
tion and  transportation  has  transformed 
the  whole  objective  aspect  and  problem 
of  the  world's  life.  The  modern  city 
has  become,  in  consequence,  a  totally  dif- 
ferent thing  from  the  city  of  a  century 
ago.  Vastly  expanded  in  physical  ex- 
tent; the  groups  of  its  population  much 
more  rigorously  segregated  —  the  rich  in 
comfortable  surroundings  in  one  end  of 
the  community,  the  poor  heaped  in  ten- 
ement-vats in  the  other,  with  the  better 
middle  class  distributed  in  the  country- 
side for  thirty  miles  round  about; 
the  business  center  of  the  whole  a  throng- 
ing hive  by  day,  a  silent  tomb  at  night: 
the  modern  city  presents  overwhelming 
problems  that  could  not  even  have  been 
guessed  by  the  wildest  flight  of  imagina- 
tion a  hundred  years  ago. 

The  miracles  of  invention  that  pro- 
gressively transform  the  problem  are  ac- 
cepted as  commonplace  in  a  few  months. 


14          Human  Equipment 

A  subway-system  is  installed  that 
doubles  the  area  a  city  such  as  New 
York  may  conveniently  occupy  and 
changes  every  aspect  of  its  social  and 
industrial  activities:  three  months  after 
its  opening  let  a  stoppage  of  its  trains 
occur  for  a  few  hours,  and  men  grumble 
in  resentment  as  if  deprived  of  some 
natural  right  such  as  fresh  air  or  sun- 
shine. 

Is  it,  then,  right  to  take  this  measure- 
less increase  in  human  equipment  as  a 
sufficient  test  of  progress  ?  Indeed,  No ; 
for  "  Where  wealth  accumulates  and 
men  decay  "  the  accumulation  of  wealth 
is  an  evidence  not  of  progress,  but  of 
degeneration.  It  is  only  when  con- 
verted into  terms  of  manhood  and 
womanhood  that  we  can  interpret  justly 
the  worth  of  the  increase  in  the  material 
resources  of  life.  An  unused  tool  may 
be  a  burden,  worse  than  useless,  because 
distinctly  hampering  life.  This  applies 
to  every  aspect  of  life.  A  child  may 


Human  Equipment  15 

have  too  many  complicated  toys,  and 
so  be  repressed  instead  of  stimulated  in 
activity  and  imagination.  A  school  may 
be  furnished  too  luxuriously.  I  have 
been  in  universities  (it  was  never  my 
fortune,  good  or  bad,  to  teach  in  such 
an  one)  where  the  desks  were  so  con- 
venient, the  chairs  so  invitingly  comfort- 
able, the  whole  environment  so  benumb- 
ingly  over-rich,  that  the  danger  was 
the  student  would  sit  in  his  chair,  put 
his  feet  on  the  desk,  smoke  his  pipe 
and  let  it  go  at  that.  I  question  whether 
such  a  university  will  call  out  the  iron 
energies  of  character  and  the  vital  lead- 
ership produced  by  the  poorer,  more 
meagrely  equipped  college  of  yesterday. 
Thoreau  tells  us  that  while  he  was 
living  at  Walden  Pond  he  one  day 
picked  up,  in  his  ramble  through  the 
woods,  three  interesting  pieces  of  stone, 
brought  them  home  and  placed  them 
upon  his  desk.  He  discovered,  how- 
ever, that  the  three  pieces  of  stone  had 


16  Human  Equipment 

to  be  dusted  every  morning  before  the 
furniture  of  his  mind  was  dusted,  so 
he  threw  them  out  of  the  window  in  dis- 
gust. Few  of  us  have  the  courage  to 
do  that  with  our  bric-a-brac,  and  thus, 
unless  we  have  a  fire  or  are  compelled 
to  move  across  the  continent,  our  houses 
get  so  overcrowded  with  meaningless 
stuff  that  in  the  end  the  man  scarcely 
dares  walk  upright  across  the  room  for 
fear  of  shaking  the  china  off  the  what- 
not. 

Oliver  Wendell  Holmes  wrote  a 
charming  poem,  which  is  recited  at  many 
a  high  school  graduation,  on  the 
Chambered  Nautilus;  telling  how  the 
little  creature  builds  each  year  its  larger 
dwelling,  and  urging  man,  too,  to  build 
the  ever  larger  habitation,  till  only  the 
blue  sky  shuts  him  from  the  Divine. 
It  is  a  beautiful  poem,  and  far  be  it  from 
me  to  spoil  it  for  anyone;  yet  I  have 
always  thought  there  are  two  sides  to 
the  Chambered  Nautilus  symbol.  Af- 


Human  Equipment  17 

ter  all,  building  each  year  its  larger 
dwelling,  the  poor  creature  can  live  only 
in  its  front  room  while  it  must  carry 
its  whole  house  on  its  back.  That  be- 
ing the  case,  would  it  not  be  better  for 
the  Chambered  Nautilus  if  it  could  get 
rid  of  its  unused  rooms?  So  man  must 
carry  his  whole  house  on  his  back:  un- 
less he  can  really  live  in  all  the  rooms, 
might  it  not  be  better  to  reduce  the  size 
of  his  dwelling?  The  whole  fabric  of 
material  equipment  rests  on  the  brain 
power  and  biological  stuff  of  human  na- 
ture: unless  all  the  equipment  can  be 
servicably  utilized  for  the  purposes  of 
life,  it  becomes  a  hampering  weight  lim- 
iting the  freedom  of  the  spirit. 

Thus  the  reactionists,  in  all  highly  de- 
veloped periods  of  civilization,  have 
wished  to  go  back  to  more  primitive 
conditions  of  life. .  This  is  the  signifi- 
cance in  Rousseau's  gospel  of  a  return 
to  the  "  noble  savage."  To  be  sure, 
the  noble  savage  is  viewed  by  Rousseau 


1 8  Human  Equipment 

from  eighteenth  century  Paris  and 
Fontainebleau,  and  would  doubtless  have 
looked  very  different  had  Rousseau 
sought  him  out  in  his  native  wilderness ; 
yet  the  turning  away  from  an  over-re- 
fined civilization  expresses  a  sincere  hun- 
ger for  the  realities  of  the  spirit  of 
man  and  a  desire  to  escape  from  the 
weight  of  things  which  can  no  longer 
be  utilized  for  life  and  so  hamper  in- 
stead of  helping  the  human  spirit. 

Edward  Carpenter  —  a  Rousseau  of 
our  day  —  writes  similarly  his  charming 
essay  on  Civilization:  its  Cause  and 
Cure,  treating  our  vaunted  material 
equipment  as  a  disease.  We  do  not 
share  the  mood  of  reaction  of  these  men, 
but  they  compel  us  to  recognize  the 
serious  problem  in  all  our  boasted  prog- 
ress. It  is  this:  can  man  live  in  his 
house?  Can  he  utilize  this  amazingly 
developed  and  ever-increasing  equipment 
of  civilization  for  the  ends  of  his  own 


Human  Equipment  19 

deeper  life,  and  pass  it  all  on,  bettered 
by  his  use  of  it,  to  the  next  generation? 
The  problem  seems  amusing  when  first 
stated,  but  grows  in  ominous  import  as 
we  reflect  upon  it. 

The  situation  in  the  larger  world 
rests  back,  however,  on  the  problem  of 
the  individual  life  that  is  the  soul  of  the 
whole.  The  relation  of  man  to  the  hu- 
man equipment  is,  reduced  to  its  lowest 
terms,  the  problem  of  the  relation  of 
each  man  to  the  tools  and  opportunities 
of  his  life.  The  character  of  the  whole, 
in  the  last  analysis,  depends  upon  the 
character  of  the  unit  part.  Public  opin- 
ion is  the  sum  or  product  of  private 
opinions.  To  reform  society  is  to  make 
over  the  men  and  women  who  compose 
society.  A  sound  relation  of  the  world 
to  its  material  tools  merely  expresses  the 
combined  harmony  of  individuals  all 
rightly  adjusted  to  the  opportunities  of 
life.  A  sound  ethics  is  the  soul  of  a 


2O  Human  Equipment 

true  sociology,  instead  of  being  a  "  path- 
ological science "  as  certain  arrogant, 
half-formed  thinkers  have  held. 

The  heart  of  our  problem  is,  then, 
in  the  individual  life ;  and  the  need  there 
is  the  consistent  practice  of  the  old 
Greek  virtue  of  Sophrosune.  This 
means  more  than  temperance,  which  has 
come  to  have,  in  current  usage,  an  un- 
fortunately negative  meaning.  True 
temperance  should  mean,  not  abstinence 
or  ascetic  reaction,  but  a  right  use  of 
things.  The  Greeks,  except  in  the  few 
men  who  came  to  be  dominated  by  ori- 
ental influence,  never  exalted  abstinence 
or  made  the  mistake  of  opposing  soul 
and  body  as  respectively  good  and  evil. 
They  never  regarded  it  as  noble  to 
macerate  the  flesh  or  blindly  root  out 
natural  desires  and  capacities.  They 
aspired  toward  right  proportion  in 
the  different  activities  and  relations  of 
life;  and  indeed  it  is  such  right  propor- 
tion that  is  needed.  The  obscuring  of 


Human  Equipment  21 

that  sound  view  by  the  ascetic  reactions 
of  certain  teachings  and  epochs,  not  only 
resulted  in  unwise  abandonment  of  life, 
but  encouraged  as  well  the  opposite 
swing  of  the  pendulum  to  the  extremes 
of  unrestricted  sensual  indulgence.  The 
one  type  of  failure  is,  in  itself,  as  far 
from  the  true  life  as  the  other.  Aban- 
doning things  is  no  more  wise  (though 
less  ugly)  than  sinking  into  slavery  to 
them.  Temperance  is  usually  as  much 
better  than  abstinence  as  it  is  always 
more  difficult.  As  a  theory  of  life,  as- 
ceticism leads  to  moral  failure  as  truly 
as  sensualism. 

I  do  not  refer  here  to  asceticism  as 
a  means  of  self-discipline,  and  hence  a 
valuable  factor  in  moral  education,  but 
to  the  life-theory  that  blindly  giving  up 
opportunity  and  joy  in  the  natural  life  is 
in  itself  virtue  and  pleasing  to  God  — 
that  there  is  an  inevitable  opposition  be- 
tween the  spiritual  and  the  natural  life, 
the  attainment  of  the  one  meaning  the 


22  Human  Equipment 

abrogation  of  the  other.  This  theory 
reaches  its  reductio  ad  absurdum  in  such 
words  as  these  quoted  approvingly  by 
St.  Jerome  from  the  counsel  of  the 
saintly  Paula :  "  A  clean  body  and  a 
clean  dress  mean  an  unclean  soul." 
(Letters,  Nicene  and  Post-Nicene  Fa- 
thers, Second  Series,  Vol.  VI,  p.  206.) 

To  choose  an  illustration  a  little  fur- 
ther away:  Mohammedanism  gives  a 
definite,  if  crude,  statement  of  the  the- 
ory in  holding  that  if  we  will  abstain 
from  wine  and  certain  pleasures  of  the 
senses  in  this  world,  we  shall  have  a 
heaven  of  wine  and  houris  in  the  next, 
with  no  day  after  and  its  headache. 
What  shrewd  man  who  believed  the  doc- 
trine would  not  accept  the  contract  I 

Let  me  repeat  then,  the  abandonment 
of  things  urged  by  asceticism  is  not  the 
need;  rather  it  is  sound  relation  to  things 
and  the  right  use  of  them  for  the  true 
aims  of  life,  thus  making  the  natural 
life  the  expression  and  instrument  of  the 


Human  Equipment  23 

spiritual.  How  beautiful  the  outer  life 
is  when  it  clothes  as  a  fitting  garment 
the  life  within.  A  graceful,  active  body 
is  a  much  better  instrument  of  the  mind 
than  an  emaciated,  distorted  one. 
Cleanliness  is  better  than  dirt,  strength 
than  feebleness.  The  touch  of  the  hand 
and  glance  of  the  eye  are  the  natural 
language  of  friendship,  while  even  the 
mystery  of  passion  becomes  the  sweet 
vocabulary  of  a  sanely-ordered  love. 
All  aspects  of  the  natural  life  are  thus 
sound  and  beautiful  when  in  right  rela- 
tion to  the  deeper  life  of  the  spirit, 
clothing  the  latter  as  an  expressive  gar- 
ment; it  is  only  when  this  relation  is  bro- 
ken and  the  outer  life  is  sought  as  an 
end  in  itself  that  it  becomes  the  source 
of  evil. 

Error,  nevertheless,  is  much  easier  on 
one  side  of  the  balance  than  the  other. 
If  asceticism  is  as  far  from  the  truth  as 
sensualism,  it  is  far  less  appealing  to 
the  average  human  being.  Where  one 


24  Human  Equipment 

man  unwisely  abandons  opportunity,  a 
hundred  become  slaves  to  the  things  that 
should  serve  them:  for  one  ascetic  a 
hundred  sensualists.  The  minds  that 
temperamentally  react  against  life  are 
few;  most  of  us  easily  turn  the  other 
way.  In  food  and  drink,  dress,  amuse- 
ments, social  habits,  the  common  dan- 
ger is  that  of  slipping  easily  into  sub- 
serviency to  the  comforts  and  luxuries 
of  our  existence,  until  we  become  the 
slaves  of  what  should  have  been  used 
wisely  for  the  great  ends  of  life. 

Thus,  while  the  law  of  temperance 
would  be  sufficient  could  man  follow  it 
perfectly,  the  weakness  of  human  nature 
demands  that  it  be  supplemented  for 
practical  purposes  by  a  further  law  — 
the  law  of  heroism.  This  means  see- 
ing to  it  that  man  at  every  point  is  mas* 
ter,  giving  up,  even  unnecessarily,  some 
of  the  things  that  serve  him,  to  assure 
freedom  and  self-control.  Since  the  nor- 
mal temptation  is  chiefly  on  one  side  of 


Human  Equipment  25 

the  balance,  we  must  seek  to  correct  it  by 
bearing  more  heavily  on  the  other  side. 
This  explains  the  practical  value  of  as- 
ceticism, not  as  a  life-theory,  but  as  an 
element  of  education.  To  give  up,  even 
unnecessarily,  something  one  might  en- 
joy, just  to  be  sure  one  is  keeping  the 
upper  hand,  is  a  most  valuable,  and  in 
times  like  ours,  almost  indispensable 
element  of  self-discipline.  If  there  is 
something  you  feel  you  could  not  do 
without,  then  go  without  it,  just  to  be 
sure  you  could,  if  it  be  only  a  cup  of 
coffee  in  the  morning.  Asceticism  thus 
utilized  becomes  a  sort  of  life-insurance 
of  character ;  and  that  view  should  never 
be  confused  with  the  religious  theory 
of  giving  up  for  the  sake  of  giving  up, 
as  if  blind  self-mortification  and  self- 
sacrifice  were,  in  themselves,  virtue. 

The  measure  of  asceticism  needed  as 
moral  discipline  is  in  exact  proportion 
to  the  ease  and  affluence  of  life.  As  the 
equipment  of  civilization  increases  and 


26          Human  Equipment 

becomes  more  refined,  there  is  ever  more 
danger  of  justifying  Emerson's  cry  that 
"  Things  are  in  the  saddle  and  ride 
mankind."  As  an  individual  or  a  fam- 
ily acquires  greater  wealth,  there  is  need 
for  ever  more  heroism.  The  man  must 
keep  his  freedom,  his  domination  of  the 
tools  that  serve  his  own  life,  and  the 
task  is  increasingly  difficult  as  the  equip- 
ment becomes  richer  and  more  compli- 
cated. 

Poverty  and  affluence  are  thus  both 
dangerous,  though  in  different  degree 
and  kind,  and  neither  is  so  desirable  as 
just  the  fitting  equipment  of  life,  that  is, 
the  measure  of  resource  that  can  readily 
and  fully  be  used  for  the  purposes  of 
life.  A  measure  of  poverty  often  dis- 
ciplines character  admirably,  calling  out 
the  iron  in  the  blood  and  developing 
strength  and  independence.  To  this 
end,  however,  the  strength  and  inde- 
pendence must  be  potentially  present; 
and  grinding  poverty,  acting  on  a  weaker 


Human  Equipment  27 

blood,  often  instills  bitterness  and  poi- 
sons the  springs  of  character.  The  re- 
sult thus  depends  on  the  nature  of  the 
individual  and  upon  how  he  takes  the 
experience.  "  All  things  work  together 
for  good  to  them  that  love  God " 
(Romans,  viii,  28),  that  is,  to  those 
who  meet  life  with  faith,  cheerfulness 
and  courage,  and  not  to  the  other 
people. 

We  had  at  Stanford  University,  in  the 
early  days,  a  row  of  low,  slight,  frame 
buildings,  called  "  the  Camp,"  which 
had  been  hastily  erected  for  the  Chi- 
nese laborers  at  the  time  the  first  quad- 
rangle of  buildings  was  constructed. 
Rooms  in  the  Camp  were  rented  out 
at  a  nominal  rate  to  poor  students  who 
were  earning  their  own  way, —  cooking 
for  themselves,  making  beds  in  the  dor- 
mitory, waiting  on  table,  cutting  grass 
on  the  professors'  lawns,  or  sometimes 
rising  to  the  dignity  of  secretary  work. 
I  have  watched  two  such  boys,  living 


28          Human  Equipment 

in  adjoining  rooms,  going  through  the 
same  experiences  and  meeting  the  same 
problems :  the  one  growing  stronger  and 
finer  every  day,  meeting  troubles  and 
deprivations  with  glad  courage,  earning 
the  sweet  fruit  of  character  out  of  all 
the  hardships;  while  the  other  became 
daily  more  resentful  and  bitter,  brooded 
increasingly  over  the  idea  that  his  sit- 
uation was  unjust  and  that  the  world 
owed  him  a  living,  ending  finally  as  a 
university  "  hanger-on,"  going  from  col- 
lege to  college  as  a  disappointed  parasite 
clinging  to  the  work  of  others. 

Thus  it  took  strong,  heroic  elements 
of  character  to  react  soundly  upon  the 
exigency.  To  be  developed  by  diffi- 
culty, the  qualities  of  noble  manhood 
had  to  be  potentially  present,  together 
with  a  courageous,  healthy  attitude  to- 
ward life.  Extreme  poverty  is  thus  dan- 
gerous, tending  often  to  develop  the 
sordid  views  and  petty  standards  —  es- 
timating all  of  life  in  terms  of  small 


Human  Equipment  29 

change  —  that  characterize  the  morally 
weaker  among  the  very  poor. 

However,  just  as  the  normal  error  is 
toward  sensual  indulgence  rather  than 
ascetic  reaction,  so  affluence  is  more  dan- 
gerous than  poverty,  since  it  tends  to 
benumb  and  weaken  character.  Few 
human  beings  can  safely  be  trusted  to 
use  wisely  the  opportunities  of  wealth 
without  first  being  hardened  in  the 
school  of  enforced  struggle  and  meagre 
environment.  Even  then,  with  a  sud- 
den access  of  wealth,  deterioration  of 
character  often  occurs.  I  suppose  each 
of  us  dreams  that  if  he  were  to  receive 
such  a  sudden  endowment  of  material 
power,  his  use  of  it  would  be  sane  and 
wise.  A  few  of  us  might  be  so  trusted ; 
and  if  it  comforts  us,  let  us  assume  that 
you  and  I  are  of  the  few;  but  how 
about  the  others?  The  measureless  op- 
portunities in  our  country  for  the  sudden 
discovery  and  exploitation  of  great 
natural  resources  have  given  sufficient 


30  Human  Equipment 

illustration.  The  amusingly  tragic  rec- 
ords of  countless  "  Coal-oil  Johnnies," 
who  have  passed  from  a  conventional 
humdrum  existence  to  a  brief  period  of 
flaming  debauch,  show  that  even  routine 
hardship  may  not  sufficiently  strengthen 
the  character;  while  the  frequent  de- 
generacy into  effeminate  idleness  or  reck- 
less self-indulgence  of  the  children  of 
those  whose  hard  strength  and  sober 
industry  have  heaped  up  vast  fortunes, 
indicates  the  principle  involved.  From 
the  point  of  view  of  character,  better 
then  too  little  material  equipment  than 
too  much:  it  takes  a  great,  strong  man 
to  vitalize  a  wealth  of  tools  or  the  tool 
of  wealth  with  his  own  active  strength, 
while  the  average  character  tends  to 
inertness  or  indulgence  under  affluent 
conditions  of  life.  Understand:  wealth 
is  admirable  as  power  and  opportunity, 
damning  as  master  and  seducer.  It  is 
not  money,  but  the  inordinate  love  and 
unwise  use  of  money  that  is  the  root  of 


Human  Equipment  31 

so  much  evil.  Thus,  as  temperance  is 
not  enough,  but  must  be  completed  by 
voluntarily  accepted  heroism,  so  a  de- 
liberate limiting  of  the  material  endow- 
ment of  easy  affluence  is  often  desirable, 
at  least  for  characters  still  in  the  forma- 
tive period,  to  bring  out  the  best  result 
in  manhood  and  womanhood. 

Just  here  steps  in  a  certain  school  of 
political  economists  to  tell  us  that  we 
are  entirely  wrong;  that  the  progressive 
increase  in  material  wants  is  the  chief 
force  in  civilizing  mankind ;  that  careless 
expenditure  in  obedience  to  ever-expand- 
ing desires  is  the  mainspring  of  progress; 
that  the  prime  need  is  to  keep  money 
in  circulation,  the  unbridled  luxury  of 
the  individual  thus  being  the  greatest 
benefit  to  society.  This  theory  is  one 
of  the  most  dangerous  errors  arising 
in  economics,  since  it  flatters  a  natural 
weakness  of  human  nature,  which,  un- 
corrected,  leads  to  terrible  ruin  in  the 
end.  It  is  a  convenient  and  comfort- 


32  Human  Equipment 

ing  sop  to  one's  conscience  to  believe  that 
in  some  blind  fashion  one's  whimsical 
self-gratification  works  out  to  the  bene- 
fit of  the  whole:  thus  this  superstition 
has  been  a  favorite  and  recurring  one 
in  the  past;  yet  the  price  paid  again  and 
again  has  been  as  bitter  as  the  error  is 
tempting. 

There  is,  to  be  sure,  a  measure  of 
truth  in  the  view  that  the  development 
of  wants  means  progress  in  civilization; 
but  the  growth,  when  helpful,  is  not 
simply  the  expansion  and  multiplication 
of  desires:  it  is  the  development 
of  higher  wants,  annulling  in  part  the 
lower;  involving  the  passing  from  one 
plane  of  life  to  another,  substituting 
higher  needs  for  the  mere  animal  ap- 
petites of  the  brute  man,  or  limiting 
these  brute  desires  by  the  growth  of 
those  nobler  wants  that  waken  with  the 
deepening  and  refining  of  the  personal 
spirit.  This  process,  however,  is  en- 


Human  Equipment  33 

tirely  different  from  the  multiplication 
of  reckless  expenditure  and  the  creation 
of  artificial  material  wants.  The  latter 
process  is  distinctly  not  progress,  and  the 
superstition  that  it  is  to  be  so  taken  is 
the  misleading  fallacy  the  evil  of  which 
I  wish  to  show  in  the  pages  that  fol- 
low. 

To  understand  the  nature  of  so- 
ciety, it  is  worth  while  resolving  it,  in 
theory,  into  its  elements,  as  Plato  did 
in  his  unrivalled  discussion  in  the  Re- 
public long  ago.  As  did  he,  let  us 
imagine  a  group  of,  let  us  say,  ten  men, 
with  their  families,  coming  together  to 
form  an  embryonic  community.  They 
would  speedily  discover  the  opportunity 
to  economize  time  and  strength  if  each 
man  fulfilled  one  main  task  for  the 
whole  community.  Let  one  till  the 
ground,  another  build  houses,  another 
make  shoes,  another  weave  clothing  for 
all  in  the  little  group.  By  such  simple 


34          Human  Equipment 

division  of  labor  all  would  live  more 
easily  and  possess  greater  wealth  earned 
in  fewer  hours  of  toil. 

Now  suppose  that,  through  some  ac- 
cident of  social  caprice,  a  particular  kind 
of  shoes,  made  only  by  one  man,  should 
become  more  desirable  —  so  much  so 
that  the  other  workers  would  be  willing 
to  give  twice  as  much  of  their  produce 
in  exchange  for  them  —  what  would 
happen?  Why,  in  a  short  time  a  con- 
siderable portion  of  the  accumulated 
production  of  the  community  would  get 
into  the  hands  of  the  shoemaker.  Now 
suppose  the  shoemaker,  in  obedience  to 
natural  human  desire,  brings  in  another 
man,  with  the  latter's  family,  to  serve 
him,  paying  the  newcomer  with  part  of 
the  higher  exchange  value  of  his  shoes. 
Is  it  not  evident  that  each  of  the  original 
members  of  the  commonwealth  must 
work  longer  and  harder  than  before, 
since  he  must  produce  enough  in  his  own 
field  for  eleven  families  instead  of  ten? 


Human  Equipment  35 

Would  it  not  be  foolish  to  say  that  the 
shoemaker  really  supported  his  family 
of  servants  merely  because  the  material 
with  which  to  reward  them  happened 
to  be  in  his  hands? 

Consider  the  illustration  well,  for  it 
applies  to  the  whole  of  our  society. 
Accumulated  wealth  is  power,  repre- 
senting the  stored-up  result  of  human 
labor  acting  upon  Nature.  Surely  it  is 
not  necessary  to  argue  that  the  present 
distribution  of  wealth  is  not  ideally  just. 
The  power  that  wealth  represents  is 
often  in  the  hands  of  unscrupulous,  un- 
social, capricious  individuals  merely 
from  the  accident  of  inheritance,  social 
whim,  or  the  fortunate  proximity  to 
some  natural  opportunity  or  monopoly. 
The  conclusion  is  inexorable :  all  expend- 
iture of  the  wealth  that  represents  the 
garnered  result  of  human  labor,  for 
what  is  distinctly  useless  or  harmful, 
forces  someone  to  work  harder  some- 
where in  the  social  structure.  There 


36          Human  Equipment 

is  no  escape  from  the  logic  of  the  argu- 
ment. The  process  by  which  the  result 
is  worked  out  is  tortuously  complicated, 
and  we  need  not  here  investigate  it;  but 
of  the  result  there  can  be  no  doubt: 
those  who  spend  the  accumulated  re- 
sources of  society  in  useless  and  harm- 
ful luxury  force  some  part  of  their  fel- 
low men  and  women  to  longer  and 
harder  labor.  It  is  not  the  man  who 
puts  his  hand  into  his  pocket  to  pay  an 
army  of  servants  who  really  supports 
them.  He  does  not  raise  the  grain, 
fruits  and  animals  converted  into  their 
food;  he  does  not  make  their  shoes  nor 
weave  their  clothes.  Someone  does  all 
this;  and  thus  the  diversion  of  human 
labor  to  useless  and  harmful  luxury  in- 
creases the  pressure  on  those  who  are 
engaged  in  really  productive  and  useful 
work.  Since  all  means  of  life  are  pro- 
duced or  prepared  solely  through  human 
effort,  it  is  easy  to  increase  the  burden 
on  those  who  have  little  power  through 


Human  Equipment  37 

the  misuse  of  power  by  those  who  have 
much.  Easy  to  do  this?  Ah,  our  so- 
cial structure  is  filled  with  shameless 
evidence  of  the  bitter  truth,  to  the  point 
that  all  earnest  thinking  men  and  women, 
who  love  their  fellows,  are  driven  to  a 
greater  or  less  degree  of  reaction  against 
the  glaring  injustice  of  our  social  and 
industrial  system;  and  the  crowning 
struggle  of  our  time  is  to  find  the  way 
out.  If  a  way  out  is  not  found,  in  time 
the  accumulated  injustice  becomes  so  in- 
tolerable that  the  sufferers,  having  noth- 
ing to  lose  but  a  meaningless  existence 
of  impossible  toil,  rise  up  in  the  blind 
madness  of  despair,  and  the  social 
structure  crumbles  into  revolution. 
Such  is  the  price  we  pay  for  our  pleasant 
superstition  in  the  end. 

We  need  not  argue  theoretically:  his- 
tory contains  many  illustrations  of  the 
hard  truth  of  our  thesis.  Consider,  for 
instance,  the  convincing  illustration 
France  has  given  in  modern  times.  Be- 


38         Human  Equipment 

fore  the  Revolution,  the  nobility  of 
France  had  got  into  its  own  hands  not 
only  most  of  the  land,  but,  as  well,  the 
power  other  accumulated  wealth  repre- 
sents. As  the  laws  of  the  state  were 
made  wholly  from  above,  it  was  possi- 
ble for  the  classes  holding  power  to  re- 
lieve themselves  increasingly  from  pro- 
ductive activity  and  from  bearing  their 
just  share  of  the  nation's  taxes.  While 
there  were  many  noble  men  and  women 
and  much  helpful  service  was  given  from 
the  motive  of  noblesse  oblige,  the  tend- 
ency was  dominantly  selfish,  until  the 
burden  resting  upon  the  peasantry  and 
artisan  groups  became  unendurable. 
Poverty  and  misery  increased  ominously. 
Finally  it  became  impossible  to  wring 
from  the  productive  classes  at  the  bot- 
tom of  society  sufficient  wealth  in  taxes, 
rents  and  other  emoluments  to  support 
the  expanded  wants  and  luxurious  ex- 
travagance of  the  non-productive  legion 
at  the  top.  The  state  faced  bankruptcy ; 


Human  Equipment          39 

and  so  one  financial  scheme  after  an- 
other was  tried  in  the  vain  effort  to 
create  a  false  semblance  of  the  wanting 
prosperity  —  schemes  for  driving  in  the 
symptoms  of  the  disease  instead  of  cur- 
ing the  patient.  Apparently,  money 
was  lacking;  really,  the  wise,  universal, 
coordinated,  productive  activity  —  the 
accumulated  results  of  which  money 
symbolizes  —  was  lacking.  The  best- 
hearted  of  the  aristocrats  took  the  worst 
course,  seeking  by  lavish  expenditure  to 
relieve  the  sufferings  of  the  people,  while 
succeeding  only  in  converting  more  pro- 
ductive workers  into  servants  and  syco- 
phants of  the  rich.  Fine  ladies,  dis- 
tressed at  the  misery  of  peasant  girls, 
urged  the  buying  of  more  lace,  thus  in- 
creasing the  number  ,  of  individuals 
turned  to  employments  gratifying  the 
luxury  of  the  few  instead  of  answering 
the  needs  of  the  many.  The  result  of 
it  all  was  —  The  French  Revolution  — 
a  terrible  cleansing  by  fire,  in  which  a 


40  Human  Equipment 

mass  of  special  privilege  was  burned 
away  and  the  nation  started  afresh  on 
a  foundation  of  at  least  somewhat  more 
general,  coordinated,  productive  activ- 
ity. 

Now  far  be  it  from  me  to  decry  baldly 
the  buying  of  lace:  beautiful  lace  on  a 
beautiful  woman  is  a  lovely  thing  and 
has  its  own  artistic,  and  therefore  eco- 
ndmic,  justification;  but  to  imagine  that 
"  buying  more  lace  "  was  really  curing 
the  poverty  of  the  people  was  flattering 
selfishness  with  a  superstition  that  had 
to  be  paid  for  at  a  terrible  price.  It  is 
difficult  to  characterize  strongly  enough 
the  folly  and  fallacy  of  imagining  that 
reckless  expenditure  for  luxury,  by  put- 
ting money  into  circulation,  will  cure  the 
economic  distress  directly  caused  by  the 
previous  careless  misuse  of  wealth  and 
power  by  a  class  living  chiefly  for  its  own 
idle  indulgence. 

I  grant  there  are  times  when  it  may 
be  desirable  and  wise  simply  to  buy  more 


Human  Equipment  41 

lace,  that  is,  to  make  work  artificially 
for  those  who  through  "  hard  times  " — 
disturbed  and  painful  economic  condi- 
tions—  have  lost  opportunity  to  per- 
form more  simply  productive  labor.  It 
is  better  to  pay  a  man  for  sheerly  useless 
work  than  to  feed  him  on  charity. 
There  are  times  when  it  may  even  be 
wise  to  pay  a  man  two  dollars  a  day  to 
carry  a  pile  of  stones  across  the  road, 
and  two  dollars  the  next  day  to  carry 
the  same  pile  back  again  (only,  to  keep 
his  self-respect,  the  laborer  must  sup- 
pose there  is  some  advantage  in  remov- 
ing the  stones)  ;  but  such  expenditure  is 
merely  an  opiate  to  relieve  unbearable 
economic  pain.  Any  wise  physician  will 
prescribe  an  opiate  in  certain  diseases 
to  relieve  pain  that  is  intolerable;  but 
the  opiate  is  merely  to  tide  over  the  exi- . 
gency  and  give  the  organism  a  chance  to 
recuperate.  To  take  morphine  for  bread 
produces  results  only  too  tragically  well 
known.  So  in  the  life  of  society,  to 


42          Human  Equipment 

relieve  the  pain  of  economic  disease  by 
temporarily  making  work  through  arti- 
ficial expenditure  may  be  a  desirable, 
though  always  dangerous,  expedient, 
giving  the  social  organism  a  chance  to 
recuperate;  but  to  mistake  such  an  eco- 
nomic opiate  for  the  nourishing  bread  of 
productive  labor  is  to  invite  just  such 
tragic  ruin  as  France  experienced  in  the 
Revolution. 

It  is  unnecessary  to  multiply  historic 
illustrations:  the  same  clear  strand  runs 
through  the  complicated  web  of  eco- 
nomic relations  in  ancient  Roman  so- 
ciety in  the  period  of  its  decline,  and  in 
many  a  lesser  cataclysm  in  the  rise  and 
fall  of  the  tides  of  life.  The  principle 
is  of  universal  application.  Not  the 
least  impressive  example  is  clearly  evi- 
dent in  our  American  life.  Preceding 
every  financial  and  business  depression 
our  country  has  experienced  in  recent  dec- 
ades has  been  invariably  a  period  of  ex- 
travagant living.  This  was  notably  true 


Human  Equipment  43 

before  the  last  panic  ( 1 907 ) .  All  classes 
of  the  people  had  been  for  some  years 
obviously  living  beyond  their  means.  I 
do  not  mean  that  in  all  cases  they  were 
spending  money  that  literally  had  not 
been  earned,  though  that  was  often  true; 
but  that  the  proportion  of  expenditure 
to  income  was  foolishly  extravagant. 
The  era  of  prosperity  seemed  endless; 
and  it  was  to  the  interest  of  nearly  every- 
one to  inculcate  in  all  others  the  super- 
stition that  it  would  not  end.  Nearly 
everyone  discounted  the  future,  spending 
on  the  anticipated  earnings  of  to-mor- 
row; and  this  folly  was  encouraged  by 
many  a  trusted  leader  of  the  people,  on 
the  ground  that  general  good  would  re- 
sult therefrom.  Manufactured  articles 
were  produced  in  excess  of  the  demand 
on  the  assumption  that  the  demand 
must  steadily  increase,  as  had  been  true 
for  some  years  past.  The  newspaper 
jests  regarding  men  who  mortgaged 
their  homes  in  order  to  buy  automo- 


44          Human  Equipment 

biles  were  only  too  sadly  true  of  the 
facts. 

Then  came  the  crash :  a  slight  disturb- 
ance of  business  confidence,  due  to  minor 
causes,  such  as  a  few  striking  bank  fail- 
ures, and  the  panic  was  on.  Money 
disappeared  from  circulation;  the  de- 
mand for  manufactured  articles  dropped 
away  down;  mercantile  and  industrial 
concerns  were  crippled  or  compelled  to 
suspend  operations.  The  reckless  pur- 
chasers of  automobiles,  referred  to 
above,  in  some  instances  had  not  money 
enough  to  buy  gasoline  with  which  to 
run  their  machines,  while  the  mortgages 
on  their  homes  were  being  foreclosed. 
From  the  powerful  the  pressure  de- 
scended rapidly  to  the  poor,  until  the 
lessened  activity  forced  thousands  out 
of  employment  and  left  them  and  their 
families  stranded  in  misery  and  want. 
People  everywhere  exclaimed:  "How 
terrible  the  loss  of  public  confidence! 
Let  everybody  shout  for  good  times. 


Human  Equipment  45 

We  need  a  new  currency  law  that  will 
furnish  an  expansive  medium  of  ex- 
change and  keep  money  in  circulation." 

It  is  true,  that  in  our  complicated  in- 
dustrial life  the  currency  problem  is  an 
important  one,  requiring  the  best  brains 
of  economists  and  statesmen  for  its 
progressive  solution;  but  in  relation  to 
the  deeper  issues  involved  in  such  a  con- 
dition of  business  paralysis  it  is  the 
merest  incident.  Men  say,  in  such  a 
time,  that  money  is  needed:  really  the 
need  is  for  the  sober  and  productive  ac- 
tivity and  the  wise  proportioning  of  ex- 
penditure to  income,  that  permit  the 
accumulation  of  resources  of  which 
money  is  merely  the  symbol.  ^ 

There  are  two  causes  of  a  panic. 
The  immediate  or  initiating  cause  is  a 
sudden  shock  to  public  confidence,  and 
this,  while  apparently  all-important,  is 
relatively  incidental.  The  deeper  cause 
is  extravagant  living,  unwise  discounting 
of  the  future,  rotten  business  conditions 


46          Human  Equipment 

that  have  persisted  unseen  for  a  long 
time  —  all  action  in  obedience  to  the 
superstition  of  "  good  times  "  that  pros- 
perity will  continue  and  increase  without 
limit. 

All  business  proceeds  on  a  basis  of 
mutual  trust :  not  that  we  believe  in  each 
other  entirely  —  far  from  it;  but  that 
we  are  confident  the  majority  of  our  as- 
sociates mean  to  do  the  reasonably  just 
and  right  thing.  Now  let  some  sudden 
shock  to  this  mutual  trust  occur,  coming 
perhaps  from  a  slight  initiating  cause  — 
a  startling  business  failure,  an  unimport- 
ant disturbance  of  international  rela- 
tions, or  what  not,  but  spreading  rapidly 
from  mind  to  mind:  immediately  we 
all  begin  to  draw  back,  to  refuse  credit 
and  hold  on  to  our  available  cash ;  banks 
refuse  their  ordinary  accommodations, — 
in  a  word,  all  our  customary  devices  for 
discounting  the  future  and  trading  in 
advance  on  the  prosperity  we  hope  may 
come  are  suddenly  cut  off.  The  result 


Human  Equipment          47 

is  as  inevitable  as  it  is  swift  in  coming: 
all  that  has  been  rotten  for  so  long  is 
suddenly  shown  to  be  rotten;  the  drafts 
we  have  drawn  on  an  imagined  but  im- 
possible future  prosperity  come  due  and 
must  be  paid;  the  disease  that  had  been 
so  carefully  concealed  within  the  eco- 
nomic body  suddenly  breaks  out  onto 
the  surface  with  all  its  painful  symp- 
toms. 

To  suppose  that  the  influence  which 
has  brought  the  disease  to  the  surface 
is  its  true  cause  is  childishly  to  misread 
the  whole  situation.  The  shock  to  pub- 
lic confidence  initiated  the  period  of  dis- 
tress, it  did  not  cause  it;  and  the  longer 
the  shock  was  postponed,  granted  that 
the  extravagant  living  and  unwise  busi- 
ness activity  continued,  the  greater  must 
be  the  distress  when  the  shock  came.  In 
other  words,  the  longer  you  allow  an 
accumulating  debt  to  run,  the  heavier 
must  be  the  payment;  the  longer  you 
play  a  losing  game,  the  bigger  is  the  loss; 


48          Human  Equipment 

the  extent  to  which  you  continue  a  busi- 
ness that  is  really  a  failure,  the  larger 
is  the  ruin  in  the  end. 

Thus  a  panic  is  not  an  unmitigated 
evil:  it  is  in  reality  a  clearing-house  in 
which  we  pay  our  bad  debts.  It  is  only 
in  "  good  times  "  that  a  business  which 
is  really  running  behind  can  apparently 
succeed.  Then,  by  unwarrantably  an- 
ticipating the  future,  borrowing  from 
one  to  pay  another,  the  real  failure  can 
be  covered  up  and  an  appearance  of 
prosperity  and  growth  be  put  on;  but 
when  "  hard  times  "  come,  such  decep- 
tion is  no  longer  possible.  The  disease 
that  was  present  all  the  time  is  forced 
to  the  surface ;  what  was  rotten  all  along 
is  suddenly  shown  to  be  rotten. 

Granted  that  the  disease  was  present 
in  the  social  organism,  is  it  not  better  to 
have  it  come  to  the  surface?  Might 
not  a  juggling  with  the  medium  of  ex- 
change, which  covered  up  the  disease 
and  made  possible  a  postponing  of  the 


Human  Equipment  49 

issue,  do  incalculable  harm?  The  pity, 
of  course,  of  the  acute  form  of  the 
disease  is  that  the  innocent  suffer  with 
the  guilty.  Not  only  is  the  business 
that  is  really  a  failure  forced  to  the 
wall,  but  with  it  is  often  overwhelmed 
that  which  is  ordinarily  successful,  which, 
if  the  disturbed  condition  could  only  be 
bridged  over,  would  continue  on  an  hon- 
est basis.  This,  after  all,  is  only  what 
is  true  of  human  life  generally.  We 
cannot  escape  from  each  other  even  if 
we  try;  the  good  or  bad  fortune  of  each 
must  affect  his  neighbors  as  well  as  him- 
self. Just  as  a  physical  epidemic,  start- 
ing in  the  careless  uncleanness  of  a  few, 
will  spread  to  an  innocent  multitude,  so 
is  it  with  the  diseases  affecting  the  social 
organism.  Thus  our  common  suffering 
is  merely  one  consequence  of  our  being, 
whether  or  not  we  wish  the  task,  "  our 
brother's  keeper." 

The  true  cause  of  a  time  of  industrial 
depression   and   general   distress   points 


50  Human  Equipment 

the  way  to  the  right  remedy :  saner  living 
and  just  proportioning  of  expenditure 
and  income,  use  and  production.  In 
place  of  advocating  this  thorough-going 
remedy,  however,  the  people  who  pro- 
claim the  loss  of  public  confidence  to  be 
the  cause  of  the  distress  shout  loudly 
that  the  great  need  is  to  restore  mutual 
trust  by  some  device  of  an  expanded 
currency.  They  condemn  as  public 
enemies  all  who  look  forward  soberly  to 
the  inevitable  long  period  of  depression 
and  refuse  to  go  forward  blindly  in  the 
career  of  reckless  production  and  ex- 
penditure, and  they  hope  thus  to  create 
artificially  anew  the  vanished  epoch  of 
apparent  prosperity.  Now  it  is  all  very 
well  to  whistle  to  keep  up  your  courage; 
but  when  you  have  to  pass  through  a 
forest  of  fallen  trees  on  a  dark  night,  the 
wise  course  is  not  to  shut  your  eyes  and 
run  blindly  forward.  Courageous  run- 
ning is  a  good  thing  in  its  place,  but  not 
in  the  above  circumstances. 


Human  Equipment  51 

Thus,  if,  in  time  of  panic,  we  say  that 
the  country  has  vast  resources  scarcely 
touched,  that  the  recuperative  power  of 
the  people  is  immense,  that  sobriety, 
thrift  and  industry  will  show  large  re- 
turns and  cause  the  temporary  distress 
quickly  to  pass  away,  we  are  well  within 
the  bounds  of  truth  and  are  meeting  the 
issue  wisely;  but  if  we  ignore  the  deeper 
causes  of  our  suffering  —  extravagant 
living  and  careless  luxury,  if  we  pro- 
claim that  blind  confidence  and  an  ex- 
panded currency  alone  are  needed,  that 
an  increased  tension  of  feverish  living 
is  all  that  is  required  to  correct  the 
disease  caused  by  the  same  course  of 
action  in  the  past;  then  we  are  treating 
the  symptoms  instead  of  the  patient,  we 
are  driving  in  the  disease  only  to  make 
it  more  terrible  when  it  inevitably  does 
break  out  at  last. 

An  equally  foolish  superstition  is  to 
charge  economic  distress  and  credit  pros- 
perity wholly  to  the  political  party  that 


52          Human  Equipment 

happens  to  be  in  power  at  the  time. 
This  illusion  is  fostered  by  demagogues 
of  all  parties,  since  it  serves  conveniently 
their  selfish  aims.  How  many  times  the 
American  people  have  thus  been  blind- 
folded and  led  by  the  nose :  business  de- 
pression being  used  to  frighten  them 
into  granting  power  to  those  who  would 
exploit  them !  That  bad  legislation  can 
do  considerable  harm  and  good  legisla- 
tion may  help  somewhat,  everyone 
knows ;  but  to  suppose  that  economic  con- 
ditions resulting  from  the  habit  of  life  of 
the  people  over  a  long  period  of  time 
are  due  wholly  to  political  devices  and 
party  control  is  to  obscure  the  issue  to 
the  point  of  inviting  greater  disaster. 

Goethe,  with  his  shrewd  and  profound 
wisdom,  saw  rightly  the  whole  problem 
and  satirized  unmercifully  the  false 
prophets  in  the  paper-money  episode  of 
the  Second  Part  of  Faust.  He  portrays 
the  larger  world  of  the  Empire  as  cursed 
by  the  same  life  of  lawless  and  aimless 


Human  Equipment          53 

caprice  previously  studied  in  the  little 
world  of  the  First  Part.  The  emperor 
neglects  his  function  of  just  governing 
for  the  sake  of  the  whimsical  pleasures 
of  the  moment.  The  whole  court,  with 
all  the  officials  of  the  Empire,  takes  the 
cue  and  follows  the  same  capricious 
course.  The  dry  rot  of  foolish  living 
descends  through  all  orders  of  society: 
the  merchant  neglects  his  business,  the 
laborer  and  the  farmer  his  task.  The. 
result  is  extreme  distress  and  disorder. 
The  treasury  is  bankrupt,  "  bread  al- 
ready eaten  "  is  served  at  the  imperial 
table,  the  means  of  life  are  wanting  in 
all  grades  of  society,  while  crimes  of  all 
sorts  abound  and  multiply.  The  Em- 
pire is  on  the  verge  of  revolution. 

Along  comes  Mephistopheles,  symbol 
of  the  life  of  utter  non-reason,  that  is, 
aimless  caprice,  since  the  field  is  ripe  for 
him.  His  diagnosis  is  as  simple  as  it  is 
sophistical:  the  Empire  needs  money; 
were  there  plenty  of  money  all  would 


54  Human  Equipment 

have  the  means  to  procure  the  neces- 
saries, comforts  and  luxuries  of  life. 
Well,  there  is  plenty  of  gold  in  the 
ground  —  even  of  the  buried  treasure 
that  is  legally  the  property  of  the  em- 
peror. Why  not  issue  paper  notes  on 
this  buried  treasure  and  distribute  them 
universally?  If  their  validity  is  ques- 
tioned, one  need  only  dig  up  some  of  the 
treasure  to  prove  that  one  could  dig 
more.  Thus  the  standard  of  the  cur- 
rency will  be  maintained  and  all  will 
live  in  ease  and  luxury.  Could  one  in- 
vent a  better  scheme  for  an  expanded 
currency  to  cure  economic  distress? 
It  is  the  devil's  scheme,  indeed;  but 
how  many  have  been  caught  by  it  in 
varied  forms  in  the  past!  (and  the  pres- 
ent?) 

The  plan  is  put  into  execution  in  the 
jugglery  of  the  masquerade  night.  The 
notes  are  signed  by  the  emperor,  multi- 
plied by  the  presses  and  spread  broad- 
cast. Booming  prosperity  is  the  appar- 


Human  Equipment  55 

ent  immediate  result.  Since  everyone 
can  buy,  everyone  can  sell,  and  feverish 
business  activity  recommences.  Mephis- 
topheles  and  his  pupil  are  the  heroes  of 
the  hour.  The  butcher  sells  his  meat 
and  buys  bread  and  cake;  the  merchant 
disposes  of  his  stock  and  carelessly  pur- 
chases all  that  his  whims  demand;  the 
courtiers  again  enjoy  the  listless  life 
of  luxury;  the  treasury  is  filled  and  the 
emperor  embarrassed  with  superfluous 
wealth. 

Is  it  any  wonder  that,  drunk  with 
new-found  power  to  gratify  every  ca- 
price, the  emperor  is  seized  with  his 
supreme  whim  and  demands  of  Faust 
that  Helena,  symbol  of  the  absolute 
beauty  achievable  only  at  the  end  of  the 
long  road  of  toiling  art,  be  immediately 
called  forth  from  the  realms  of  the  dead 
that  are  ever-living,  since  born  of  the 
creative  imagination,  merely  to  give  a 
half-hour's  diversion  to  the  blase  court? 
Ah,  how  the  fashionable,  luxury-loving 


$6          Human  Equipment 

world  always  misconceives  art  and  pat- 
ronizingly attaches  it  as  an  adorning 
fringe  to  an  already  meaningless  exist- 
ence! 

Faust,  here  the  inspired  artist,  takes 
,the  task  seriously:  armed  with  the  key 
of  the  artist's  insight  and  the  tripod  of 
his  wisdom,  he  descends  to  the  world 
of  uncreate  energies  and  vaguely  vast 
powers  —  the  Mothers  —  from  whose 
bosom  the  perfectly  limited  forms  of  art 
are  born,  and  calls  Helena  and  Paris 
again  to  their  love-making  on  the  vision- 
ary stage  of  time.  Faust  alone  knows 
that  art  is  serious  business,  to  be  under- 
taken reverently  or  not  at  all.  The 
courtiers  pass  their  pleasant,  patroniz- 
ing comments  on  the  scene  before  them. 
The  ladies  are  pleased  with  the  youthful 
bloom  of  Paris  but  find  Helena  faded 
and  passe.  The  gentlemen  dislike  the 
peasant  roughness  of  the  youth,  but,  as 
one  of  them  puts  it,  would  be  quite  con- 
tent with  the  "  fair  remains  "  of  Hele- 


Human  Equipment  57 

na's  beauty.  Little  short  of  insulting 
are  both  lords  and  ladies  in  supercilious, 
unwarranted  superiority  to  the  beauty 
they  ought  humbly  to  revere.  Read  it, 
friends,  this  Second  Part  of  Faust  that 
nobody  reads  these  days  and  that,  diffi- 
cult it  is  true,  surpasses  in  its  particular 
insight  anything  else  in  literature. 

The  court-fool  is,  in  Goethe's  por- 
trayal, almost  the  only  wise  man  in  the 
imperial  circle.  He  takes  his  five  thou- 
sand dollars,  picked  up  from  the  care- 
less droppings  of  others,  and  uses  them 
to  buy,  far  from  the  court,  land  he  can 
stand  erect  on  when  his  foolish  superiors 
go  down  in  the  crash. 

And  the  crash  comes  —  implacably ! 
In  a  little  while  the  surplus  production 
of  past  industry  is  consumed;  the  entire 
society  has  been  using  carelessly  the 
new-found  opportunity  to  gratify  its 
whims  and  desires,  instead  of  engaging 
in  sober,  productive  labor;  soon  the  pa- 
per notes  decline  and  then  lose  all  value 


58  Human  Equipment 

and  will  no  longer  purchase  anything, 
since  the  fact  that  they  symbolize  no 
reality  of  labor  and  production  has  been 
forced  home  on  all  by  the  rise  in  prices 
and  disappearance  of  the  commodities 
of  life.  The  ensuing  distress  proved 
tenfold  worse  than  anything  that  existed 
before. 

You  see,  in  the  devil's  cure,  they 
treated  the  symptoms  but  accentuated 
the  cause  of  the  disease.  It  seemed,  as 
I  have  pointed  out,  that  money  was 
wanting,  but  what  really  was  wanting 
was  the  regular,  continuous  industry  and 
wise  relation  of  expenditure  to  in- 
come that  create  and  accumulate  that 
of  which  money  is  the  convenient  symbol. 
Only  for  a  short  time  can  the  cleverest 
political  deception  maintain  the  exchange 
value  of  a  symbol  that  no  longer  sym- 
bolizes anything.  Thus  to  create  the 
symbol  without  the  thing  it  stands  for, 
as  in  the  paper-money  scheme,  meant 
surely  that  the  symbol  would  signify 


Human  Equipment  59 

nothing  in  the  end.  Whatever  makes 
possible  the  satisfaction  of  human  de- 
sires without  constructing  the  basis  on 
which  such  satisfaction  normally  and 
reasonably  rests  is  unmitigatedly  bad  in 
its  effect  on  the  individual  and  on  society 
alike.  It  is  this  Mephistopheles  accom- 
plished for  the  empire  as  it  was  this  he 
achieved  for  Faust  in  the  little  world 
of  the  First  Part,  with  ruinous  conse- 
quences in  both  cases;  and  it  is  just  this 
that  has  been  attained  by  Mississippi 
Bubbles  and  other  John  Law  schemes, 
paper-money  devices,  lessening  by  gov- 
ernmental action  the  true  value  of  the 
medium  of  exchange,  Roman  imperial 
largesses  to  the  people,  buying  more  lace 
in  the  pre-revolutionary  days  in  France, 
devices  for  juggling  the  currency  and 
creating  a  false  semblance  of  prosperity 
in  panic  times  in  America. 

No!  that  is  not  the  way  out:  it  is 
truly  the  devil's  scheme  —  the  further 
stimulating  and  gratifying  of  caprice  that 


60          Human  Equipment 

is  the  opposite  of  reason.  The  only 
true  and  lasting  cure  for  the  economic 
disease,  the  acute  symptoms  of  which 
appear  in  "  hard  times,"  is  in  sober,  in- 
dustrious labor,  wisely  simple  living,  the 
sane  proportioning  of  expenditure,  with 
a  rejection  of  useless  and  harmful  luxury. 
I  do  not  in  the  least  mean  that  life 
should  be  denuded  of  beauty  and  re- 
duced to  the  answering  of  bare  physical 
needs.  On  the  contrary,  beauty  is  the 
most  useful  thing  on  earth,  as  the  ideal 
is  the  most  practical.  There  are  some 
things  for  which  one  cannot  spend  too 
freely,  in  money,  time,  strength  and  even 
life  itself.  The  problem  is  one  of  wise 
proportion,  and  I  must  frankly  admit 
that  no  hard  and  fast  rule  can  be  laid 
down.  This  is  only  what  is  true  of  all 
aspects  of  life:  it  is  easy  to  live  by  rule 
and  useless  to  do  so ;  it  is  hard  to  adjust 
life  artistically  to  its  ever  fresh  oppor- 
tunity, but  that  is  life  and  the  end  is 
worth  the  cost. 


Human  Equipment          6 1 

Thus  no  exact  definition  of  useless  and 
harmful  luxury  can  be  given,  though  it 
is  easy  to  give  examples  of  extreme  cases. 
A  sybaritic  banquet  with  bewildering 
temptations  to  over-indulgence  in  food 
and  drink  is  useless  and  harmful  luxury. 
To  spend  forty  thousand  dollars  in  a 
year  for  a  society  woman's  gowns,  as  the 
plaintiff  in  a  recent,  much  exploited  di- 
vorce case  claimed  to  be  necessary,  is 
useless  and  harmful  luxury.  To  bewil- 
der one's  children  on  Christmas  Eve  with 
"  twenty-three  Christmas  trees  illumin- 
ated with  electric  lights,"  as  was  proudly 
reported  not  long  ago  of  a  family  of 
the  over-rich,  is,  to  say  nothing  of  spoil- 
ing the  children,  useless  and  harmful 
luxury.  To  give  a  dinner  — "  the  table 
loaded  with  a  profusion  of  the  most 
costly  tropical  flowers,  live  butterflies  be- 
ing released  at  a  certain  point  in  the 
menu  to  flit  about  the  blossoms,"  is  use- 
less and  harmful  luxury.  A  man  who 
smokes  twenty  fifty-cent  cigars  in  a  day 


62          Human  Equipment 

is  indulging  in  useless  and  harmful  lux- 
ury. 

On  the  other  hand,  it  is  a  pity  every 
smoker  should  not  try,  at  least  once  in 
his  life,  a  twenty-five-cent  cigar  (it  is 
possible  to  make  them  larger  but  not 
better  in  quality)  just  to  have  the  experi- 
ence. The  lover  who  sends  a  bunch  of 
hot-house  roses  to  his  best-beloved,  pur- 
chasing the  flowers  at  the  price  of  fore- 
going several  meals,  is  not  guilty  of  use- 
less and  harmful  luxury,  but  displays 
rather  the  higher  wisdom  that  knows 
when  not  to  count  the  cost.  The  fam- 
ily among  my  friends  who  pinched  and 
scraped  that  they  might  buy  a  particu- 
larly beautiful  antique  bedroom  set  for 
their  decade-long  inhabited  sleeping- 
room,  showed  the  same  wisdom.  The 
college  student  who  foregoes  various 
pleasures  that  he  may  have  funds  enough 
to  obviate  the  need  of  taking  a  room- 
mate and  pay  freely  for  a  comfortable 
room  he  can  occupy  alone,  evidences  the 


Human  Equipment  63 

same  understanding  of  the  art  of  life. 
Thus  one  must  learn  to  forego  the  lower 
desires  for  the  sake  of  the  higher,  and 
even  to  spend  without  calculation  for 
the  truly  great  things  of  life.  Indeed, 
if  prudence  is  the  law  in  nine  circum- 
stances out  of  ten  in  human  life,  heroic 
imprudence  is  the  law  in  the  rare  tenth 
case,  beginning  just  at  the  point  where 
prudence  ceases  to  be  virtue  and  becomes 
cowardice.  Ordinarily,  we  must  save 
our  money,  time,  strength  carefully;  yet 
these  are  but  a  means  and  not  an  end, 
and  there  comes  a  time  when  the  call 
of  one's  faith,  love,  country,  friend,  of 
the  cause  in  which  one  believes,  is  so 
supreme  that  to  stop  and  count  the  cost 
is  cowardly  and  one  must  freely  give 
all  —  even  to  life  itself  —  for  that  which 
is  absolutely  worth  while.  Thus  to 
know  when  not  to  count  the  cost,  but 
to  give  all,  freely,  is  the  high-water  mark 
of  wisdom.  So  in  the  right  use  of  the 
human  equipment  that  is  our  means  of 


64  Human  Equipment 

life,  to  spend  is  as  necessary  as  to  save, 
and  only  the  constantly  given  time  and 
effort  to  attain  a  wise  proportioning  to 
the  ends  of  life  of  the  means  available 
will  solve  progressively  the  problem. 
Life  must  be  crowned  with  art  and  sci- 
ence, the  useful  must  wear  the  garment 
of  the  beautiful,  the  loftiest  spiritual 
goods  must  bless  life  and  transfigure  its 
meaning.  Thus,  far  from  denuding  life 
of  beauty  or  starving  the  higher  desires, 
the  need  is  to  spend  most  for  the  things 
best  worth  while,  less  for  what  is  of 
lower  import,  and  for  useless  and  harm- 
ful luxury  to  spend  not  at  all. 

All  this  presupposes  limited  means 
demanding  wisdom  and  care  for  their 
just  proportioning  to  the  ends  of  life. 
The  accidents  and  faults  of  our  present 
civilization,  however,  have  produced  a 
crowd  of  the  over-rich  whose  hands  are 
glutted  with  excess  of  power.  The  pity 
of  great  wealth  is  that  there  is  so  little 
one  can  do  with  it  with  assured  help- 


Human  Equipment  65 

fulness.  It  must  be  a  terrible  thing  to 
have  vast  wealth  —  and  a  tender  con- 
science; fortunate  those  of  us  who  are 
spared  the  ordeal!  Difficult  indeed  is 
it  to  give  the  wealth  away  without  harm- 
ing the  recipient.  If  you  endow  a  uni- 
versity, you  run  the  risk  of  emasculating 
its  earnestness  and  making  it  time-serv- 
ing in  spirit.  If  you  give  lavishly  to  a 
church,  you  may  make  its  members  less 
devoted  to  that  to  which  they  owe  serv- 
ice. If  you  donate  libraries,  you  may 
lower  the  self-respect  and  initiative  of 
the  communities  receiving  them.  If  you 
give  freely  to  aid  individuals,  you  dis- 
cover how  few  can  accept  the  gift  and 
keep  their  manhood,  and  you  may  in- 
crease the  list  of  weaklings  depending 
upon  the  resources  of  others.  If  you 
establish  a  great  educational  fund,  you 
give  to  many  a  college  president  the  no- 
torious extended  palm  and  well-known 
pose  of  the  medicants  of  southern  Eu- 
rope. If  you  build  homes  and  villages 


66          Human  Equipment 

for  your  working-men,  they  are  apt  to 
resent  your  patronage  and  often  prefer 
to  herd  in  squalor  in  order  to  keep  their 
freedom  and  self-direction.  If  you  en- 
dow a  museum  or  leave  your  money  to 
charity,  the  result  may  be  to  create  a 
host  of  sinecures  and  parasites.  If  you 
spend  your  wealth  for  careless  self-in- 
dulgence, we  have  seen  how  this  de- 
bauches the  individual  and  works  harm 
to  the  social  whole.  If  you  allow  the 
wealth  to  go  on  progressively  accumu- 
lating, it  threatens  the  welfare  of  your 
children  and  may  become  a  menace  to 
society. 

Not  that  these  results  are  inevitable: 
there  is  always  a  wise  way  to  use  the 
greatest  wealth;  but  to  find  and  travel 
the  way  is  indeed  a  perplexing  problem. 
Truly  the  way  of  the  wealthy  is  hard, 
and  it  remains,  without  jesting,  difficult 
for  the  very  rich  man  to  get  into  the 
heaven  of  the  spirit. 

Meantime,  we  others  need  not  con- 


Human  Equipment          67 

gratulate  ourselves  overmuch:  whether 
the  resource  be  little  or  large,  the  right 
proportioning  of  the  expenditure  is  a 
problem  of  never-ending  difficulty.  To 
that  problem  we  must  give  ourselves 
with  earnest  reverence.  There  should 
be  a  wise  and  thoughtful  regulation  of 
all  our  activities  and  of  the  use  of  that 
measure  of  power  which  our  own  labor 
or  the  accident  of  circumstances  has 
placed  in  our  hands.  It  is  not  a  barren 
material  life  nor  one  sodden  with  luxury 
that  is  desirable;  but  that  money  and 
the  power  it  represents  should  be  used 
so  that  it  may  be  converted  into  the  best 
life  for  one  in  harmony  with  the  best 
life  for  all. 

For  that  best  life  there  must  be  a  true 
simplification  of  our  existence  —  not  that 
false  simple  life  that  is  a  pleasing  nov- 
elty between  two  chapters  of  debauch, 
but  a  return  from  the  adventitious  to 
the  real,  from  things  on  the  surface  to 
those  at  the  heart.  Instead  of  living 


68  Human  Equipment 

to  the  accident  of  the  social  type  about 
us,  striving  blindly  to  get  bigger  houses 
and  a  greater  quantity  of  tasteless  stuff 
to  fill  them,  to  dress  our  .children  more 
extravagantly  than  our  neighbors,  to 
move  into  the  next  street  of  aristocratic 
snobbishness  and  then  into  the  next,  the 
need  is  that  we  should  learn  to  care 
for  the  great  simple  realities  and  live  in 
them  —  for  love  and  work  and  little 
children,  for  the  hunger  to  gain  wisdom 
and  appreciate  beauty,  for  the  desire  to 
be  of  use  to  others  and  add  our  mite 
to  the  welfare  of  the  whole.  Then  will 
the  mass  of  distracting  material  interests 
drop  away,  the  gratification  in  senseless 
luxury  seem  cheap  and  unsatisfying,  and 
the  accident  of  the  social  atmosphere  no 
longer  seduce  us  to  our  own  corruption. 
It  is  not  the  merely  "  strenuous  "  life 
that  is  needed.  Our  worship  of  mere 
effectiveness,  without  asking  the  moral 
worth  of  the  ends  it  achieves,  if  better 
than  the  way  of  slothful  indulgence,  is 


Human  Equipment  69 

nevertheless  one  of  the  grave  errors  of 
our  time.  We  are  in  danger  of  exalt- 
ing with  Carlyle  the  merely  strong  man, 
of  mistaking  for  constructive  action  a 
feverish  getting  over  the  face  of  the 
earth  and  the  waters  —  a  sort  of  aim- 
less jiggling.  No,  it  is  not  arrogant 
strenuousness,  it  is  wisdom,  balanced 
sanity,  calm  and  thoughtful  conduct  ded- 
icated to  the  upbuilding  of  the  noblest 
manhood  and  womanhood,  that  is 
needed. 

Our  society  is  cursed  with  an  unthink- 
ing materialism  that  is  multiplied  as  it 
is  echoed  from  one  to  another.  Much 
of  our  society  seems  money-mad  in  the 
blind  struggle  to  acquire  more  material 
things.  How  few  really  formulate  con- 
sciously independent  ideals  of  life  and 
live  consistently  to  them!  Human  be- 
ings are  caught  in  the  current  of  the 
crowd  and  live  as  their  neighbors  live. 
It  is  not  that  they  really  love  the  ac- 
cumulation of  stuff  they  cannot  use  and 


70  Human  Equipment 

the  satiating  of  ever-expanding  material- 
istic desires;  it  is  that  they  echo  what 
is  dominant  in  the  society  about  them. 
It  is  a  protest  in  action  and  life  against 
this  that  is  needed.  "  We  needs  must 
love  the  highest  when  we  see  it." 
People  are  more  ready  than  we  dare 
to  believe  to  respond  to  what  is  worth 
while  —  to  those  grandly  simple  reali- 
ties out  of  which  life  is  always  made 
and  which  alone  answer  the  deepest  hun- 
ger of  the  human  spirit. 

It  is  thus  in  the  fact  that  "  no  man 
liveth  to  himself  alone  "  that  the  deep- 
est significance  of  the  problem  of  luxury 
lies.  The  action  of  each  one  affects  in 
its  own  way  the  welfare  of  all.  The 
wise  use  of  the  power  in  one's  hands 
tends  in  its  own  slight  degree  to  correct 
the  evil  of  an  immoral  social  order  and 
make  for  a  saner  world.  Yet  here,  even 
the  most  powerful  of  us  is  conscious 
rather  of  his  impotence.  What  can  one 
man  do?  His  unconventional  action 


Human  Equipment  71 

seems  only  to  hamper  himself,  his  fore- 
going of  selfish  indulgence  seems  of  no 
significance  in  lessening  the  burden  on 
those  at  the  bottom,  his  influence  on  the 
social  destiny  appears  too  slight  to  be 
worth  consideration.  Ah,  the  answer  is 
simple:  it  is  not  only  the  direct  action 
that  helps,  but  the  contagion  of  the  ideal 
inspiring  it.  No  man  can  know  to  the 
full  the  influence  of  his  life  on  the  minds 
and  hearts  of  his  fellows.  As  foolish 
display  and  selfish  extravagance  are  con- 
tagious, so,  in  far  higher  measure,  is 
a  life  wisely  ordered  and  consistently 
devoted  to  noble  aims.  One  family,  in 
the  midst  of  a  luxury-loving,  material- 
istic society,  living  steadily  to  an  ideal 
of  simple  and  earnest  life,  is  a  moral 
leaven  of  incalculable  import.  Even 
Sodom  and  Gomorrah  might  have  been 
saved  if  the  patriarch  who  prayed 
for  them  had  believed  enough  in  a  suffi- 
ciently small  minority  of  the  good. 
Thus  in  a  twofold  way  all  power  is 


72          Human  Equipment 

indeed  obligation.  In  the  solidarity  of 
human  life,  neither  in  its  direct  result 
nor  in  the  contagion  of  its  inspiration, 
can  any  action  be  indifferent :  each  affects 
the  whole  for  good  or  evil,  and  it  is  our 
business  to  see  to  it  that  the  result  is 
good.  Hence  all  possession,  great  or 
small,  of  the  means  of  life,  is  just  so 
much  responsibility  to  use  the  power  for 
life's  sake  and  not  for  the  sake  of  self- 
ish indulgence ;  and  of  one  thing  we  may 
be  sure:  nothing  can  ever  be  economi- 
cally desirable  that  is  morally  wrong. 

To  dare,  in  a  society  such  as  ours, 
to  disregard  conventions  that  merely 
hamper  life;  to  have  done  with  useless 
and  harmful  luxury;  to  refuse  to  dedi- 
cate one's  life  to  the  accumulation  of 
material  things;  to  avoid  all  display  dic- 
tated by  selfish  vanity ;  to  cherish  friend- 
ship rather  than  society,  beauty  and  not 
adornment,  reality  and  never  appear- 
ance; to  hold  wealth  as  obligation  and 
all  opportunity  as  duty;  to  seek  only 


Human  Equipment  73 

what  is  truly  worth  while  and  to  seek 
that  always  with  all  one's  might  —  that 
not  only  redeems  one's  own  life,  but 
contributes  a  moral  leaven  that  helps, 
beyond  our  hopes,  to  lift  the  heavy  and 
inert  mass  of  society. 


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THE     NEW    HUMANISM 

Studies  in  Personal  and  Social  Development 

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spirit  and  developing  the  ideals  of  the  new  ethical  and 
social  humanism  which  occupies  in  our  time  the  place  held 
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A  BOOK  OF   MEDITATIONS 

A  volume  of  Personal  Reflections,  Sketches  and  Poems 
dealing  with  Life  and  Art;  an  Autobiography,  not  of 
Events  and  Accidents,  but  of  Thoughts  and  Impressions. 
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GREAT  AUTOBIOGRAPHIES 

THE  POETRY  AND  PHILOSOPHY 
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SHAKESPEARE 

THE  POETRY  AND  PHILOSOPHY 

OF  TENNYSON 

GOETHE'S  FAUST 

THE  ETHICS  OF  PERSONAL  LIFE 

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ART  AND  THE  HUMAN  SPIRIT 

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THE  USE  OF  THE  MARGIN 

BY  EDWARD  HOWARD  GRIGGS 

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time  one  has  to  spend  as  one  pleases  for  the  aim  of  attain- 
ing the  highest  culture  of  mind  and  spirit.  How  to  work 
and  how  to  play;  how  to  read  and  how  to  study,  how  to 
avoid  intellectual  dissipation  and  how  to  apply  the  open 
secrets  of  great  achievement  evidenced  in  conspicuous  lives 
are  among  the  many  phases  of  the  problem  which  he  dis- 
cusses, earnestly,  yet  with  a  light  touch  and  not  without 
humor. 

THINGS  WORTH  WHILE 

BY  THOMAS  WENTWORTH  HIGGINSON 

He  considers  in  an  intimate,  conversational  manner 
various  problems  of  thinking  and  living  and  has  entered 
fully  into  the  spirit  animating  the  publication  of  The  Art 
of  Life  Series. 

WHERE   KNOWLEDGE  FAILS 

BY  EARL  BARNES 

From  the  pen  of  a  scientific  thinker,  one  whose  attitude 
is  liberal  yet  reverent,  presenting  the  outlines  of  a  belief 
in  which  the  relations  of  knowledge  and  faith  are  clearly 
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BY  WILLIAM  DEWITT  HYDE 

He  reduces  life  to  its  fundamental  relations  showing 
the  degrees  in  which  each  may  be  fulfilled  or  violated. 
In  a  series  of  searching  questions  he  directs  attention  to 
every  human  activity. 

PRODUCT  AND    CLIMAX 

BY  SIMON  NELSON  PATTEN 

In  his  search  for  the  causes  of  social  discontent  he  finds 
wanting  a  proper  balance  between  action  in  toil  and 
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